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Last weekend / week some valiant efforts were made to import a Blogger export file into the latest WordPress release running on my laptop. Just getting that shitshow on the road was not a walk in the park. I’ll leave the next paragraph as a warning to future travellers on macOS:

WordPress will not connect to MySQL / MariaDB on localhost, update your config to use 127.0.0.1.

How PHP manages to be so consistently bad is a source of amazement.

My initial excitement about having found a plugin was tempered by the eventual realisation that the hooks are only there when saving a new entry. Presumably the code could be re-used in a pipeline that uses the Blogger REST API to pull entries, pushing them into WordPress, attaching images and rewriting img tags as it goes.

My hopes of getting this done without writing my own toolchain are slowly fading into the ether…

You do it to yourself, you do
And that’s what really hurts
Is you do it to yourself, just you
You and no-one else
You do it to yourself
You do it to yourself

That’s the thing, if i was better at ignoring things…

Last weekend’s adventure was making a local backup of all my images in Flickr. This was really about getting to a point where it wouldn’t matter if that account got closed, or the new owners (Verizon?) decided to move everything, etc. It was a good start, but there is another (bigger) problem that is going to stop me from moving forward: the IWTFY blog.

There are hundred… i don’t know, maybe thousands of posts there that link directly to the images hosted on Flickr. Oops. Besides that being against the terms of service it rather neatly ties me to keeping the Flickr account for as long as there is an IWTFY blog… and that’s ongoing for a decade at this point!

Obviously a plan is needed!

Export IWTFY from Blogger / Google – this seems straightforward.

Setup a local instance of WordPress where i can run plugins.

Write a plugin that pulls all of the images into the local WordPress instance

Export IWTFY from the local instance

Import into a hosted WordPress

This feels very much like a process that someone else must have already been through, and either made available / sells as a service… right? Proceeding onwards assuming that i’m not able to find that person / service, it looks like it isn’t difficult to use something like the WP_Http API call to grab images from within a blog post. And somewhere in here there has to be a way loop through all the entries in blog. No idea what kind of WordPress *thing* i’m supposed to be coding, but yeah… Bildung!

Sometime in the last few weeks (or months…) WordPress stopped working properly for me. The stats page wouldn’t load, the entry editor didn’t seem to work (the toolbar wasn’t displayed), and none of the gravatar user icon thingies were being rendered.

Through a process of elimination it became obvious that Ghostery was the problem, but it wasn’t enough of a hassle to spend time understanding (yes, i’ve been posting by writing html, just like the good ole days). Today i whitelisted the Gravatar Widgets and things seem to be back to normal. The WordPress Analytics can apparently stay blocked with no ill effects.

I’d imagine that this is all documented somewhere in the WordPress forums, but finding anything up to date in there is always a horror show.